Dear Forum,

I grew up using the internet on large time-shared machines at Universities. For ten years I happily did all my emailing, chatting and a lot of my work in various flavors of UNIX that were always amenable to forming community. My favorite avenue was ytalk.

After a five-year hiatus from such environments, I find myself back on a university system, this time RedHat, and no one has 'mesg y' or if they do they don't respond when I write. Everyone is idle.

Those intervening five years just happened to see the rise of Instant Messaging, Facebook and a bunch of other stuff that is reinventing the wheel if you ask me.

Then I found out that ytalk is vulnerable to certain attacks. However, the command is there, on my University's shell, and on Freeshell where I thought the situation would be different.

Am I just the only one who really liked ytalking, and everyone else was just making do with the available tools of the time? Or was there some sort of security edict against ytalk, like with telnet?

Thanks for any thoughts,
Joel

I think that with the proliferation of so many instant messenger protocols (Yahoo, MSN, AOL), people started using GAIM which then became Pidgin.

Some people also still use IRC via xchat.

I grew up using the internet on large time-shared machines at Universities. For ten years I happily did all my emailing, chatting and a lot of my work in various flavors of UNIX that were always amenable to forming community. My favorite avenue was ytalk. After a five-year hiatus from such environments

Many Slackers hang out on #slackware on freenode's IRC servers.

I remember using YTalk during my college days ...
But seriously speaking - In this age of Yahoo and MSN and GTALK - I dont see myself using YTalk ever again!


Linux Archive

I understand there are all those protocols, but I have one big problem with them: they all suck.

Joel

ok but WHY do they suck?

They suck because they don't show the typing in real time. You have to press enter to show your message in any "instant messenger." That was a big part of what made Ytalk so cool.

They're certainly not any better because they utilize a GUI, have little cartoons on them or have your picture next to the entry box.

Joel

It would be hugely inefficient to send an Ethernet packet each time someone using an instant messenger (IM) program pressed a key.

Now that there are millions (if not billions) of IM users, one packet for each character typed would result in so much unnecessary traffic that ISPs would institute measures that would result in IM developers re-writing their clients and servers to operate the way they do now.

Ytalk was not hugely inefficient, and somehow it implemented this feature. I'm not suggesting making an IM client that doesn't suck.

Ytalk is still perfectly usable; I'm wondering if there is some reason other than usability, e.g. security, that would lead to a decline in ytalk usage. Also in my hiatus telnet fell out of favor because a superior client (ssh) came along. My question was whether something analogous happened to ytalk.

The funniest thing is that people talk about using time-sharing machines in the fashion that I did as if it were a thing of the past. However, it's still perfectly possible --- I'm doing it right now.

Joel

Did Ytalk work on *one* machine or across many machines?

I don't understand your comparison. SSH did not obsolete telnet because it's superior as a "telnet" client. The connectivity aspect of telnet wasn't the problem. It obsoleted telnet because telnet is fundamentally insecure and sending passwords in the clear is a bad thing.

Are you not aware that there are command-line versions of clients for most of the messenger services?

You can ytalk to a local user, or one over the internet.

Well AIM didn't make ytalk obsolete because it's a superior ytalk client! They do different things --- that's the whole point. What ytalk does is, in my opinion, superior to what instant messengers do. On the basis of interface, however, ssh and telnet do very similar things (allow a user to connect to a remote machine and log in), but technologically and from a security perspective, they are very different.

Yes, I'm aware that I can chat in a text interface if I want to, but none of those are ytalk. Even when I had a choice between irc and ytalk, I preferred ytalk for the reasons I've listed above.

I was trying to make a broader point about the social climate of the New Internet versus the Real Internet, but I guess this is not an appropriate forum.

Joel

As somebody pointed out transmitting one character at a time over the internet is not a good model. I don't know but I guess YTalk was right for its time but now falls short because it was never designed to work with remote clients. I understand you can now use Ytalk and SSH to talk across more than one machine on a network but the model Ytalk was designed for was as you say a single, multiuser system. Time moves on.

If you mean you just like old school stuff then there's no reason you can't continue using it with your pals. I use many console apps and I don't have the opinion that GUI is better. For most things I use command line and I personally don't like using a mouse and I wish it was practical to spend all day on the machine without using one. You can use text browsers like lynx, links, etc. but you can't do certain things with them.

Modern IMs make it alot easier to communicate with people because you don't have to know somebody's IP address you can just use their name. AFAIK you can't do that with ytalk so that is a serious limitation and enough to put it on the back burner.

There are command line rss readers and usenet news readers and IMs and all kinds of stuff if you still want to pretend its the 1970s.

WEll, that's not exactly what I said. I always used ytalk over a modem-connected terminal, and rarely on an ethernet connected machine, at least before I went to college. There was never any delay. It worked just fine.

How old are you? The reason I ask is because your description of "ytalk+ssh" sounds like you don't know what it was like back in the mid-nineties. This is how it would work: dial up the university server with a modem, connect and log in. Chat with people on that machine, or over the internet. Log in to another machine using telnet if you had an account. There's no need to use telnet or ssh to chat with people on a different machine.

I have ytalk on my machine here, and if you have slackware, you can install it and we can try it out. You'll see what I mean. Email me.

It's not quite that I just like old school stuff: the old school stuff was definitely better. There was a better sense of community in connecting to people who were using a computer then, either if we were on the same system or over the internet. I just don't get the same feeling of community-building from websites that I got from using timesharing systems. I thought that when I got the chance to get back onto a university system that things would still be pretty much the same. However a lot changed in five years. Now most of the people on this campus have never touched a Unix system.

Know their name? Okay, my friend Derick had the handle "disterho." So I do

and then we chat. Boy, that really kills my memory, man. However, things got incredibly complex if he was on a different host:

You're right: that is really a lot of typing! Okay, sarcasm over: how is that different from emailing somebody? We could set up shell aliases for hostnames and logins and save ourselves typing, just like with a mail alias.

I'd really rather pretend it was the mid-nineties. That was a golden time to be a Unix-guy. I only wish that I had known what I was doing like I do now.

Overall, I don't see any real improvements in how people use computers, just a lot of stuff they've been sold and bought into. People think stuff is so much better now, and by "better" they seem to mean less efficient, more distracting, more ambiguous, unstable, hard to read, and alienating.

Joel